A JOURNEY FROM RUBY ON RAILS TO IPAD DEVELOPMENT

Since last couple of months, I was very busy in travelling, looking after my family, managing lot of other things. That’s why I didn’t get a chance to update my Blog.

One interesting thing, which happened 1 month back, is somehow, I got an opportunity to work with iPad Application. At first I thought, I am into RoR development since last 3 years, so why should I learn this new technology? What’s the future of it? Where I will be after 2 years down the line?

And surprisingly, I got an offer to work with both the technologies (i.e Ruby on Rails as well as iPad). Looks overload, isn’t it? Not at all

I admit the fact, that I am bit out of touch with the recent updates happening in Ruby on Rails community, because of the new iPad project, but I am hoping to get myself back into this very soon. But my existing knowledge into RoR, is helping my and my team, to accelerate the development speed.

In this post, I would like to tell you about the background of iPad development, Obejctive-C and Sqlite3 database.

This is not an in-depth technical article, but It will certainly help those developers, who are shifting their technologies or would like to try iPad/iPhone development.

To start with Basic development, all you need is:

The basic/advanced knowledge of Objective-C, which you’ll find it easy to learn at first go, but way to difficult when it comes to actual implementation. So be very focused while learning.

An Apple Machine. Macbook/Mac Mini would be good to go.

Xcode – A development tool for building iPad/iPhone App. Its free and you’ll get it from iTunes.

Sqlite3 – All applications running on iPad/iPhone are using Sqlite3 as a Data Storage device. So, If you’re thinking of using MySQL or Oracle or any database of your choice, the answer is ‘NO’. It comes by default with Xcode.

iPad Device: To test your application and see how it actually runs on iPad. To start with you can also see your application on Simulator.

On top of all this, you must have an Apple account. Charges to create your account is 1$.